Tracks Asking for some tips - W.I.P Hell RX

[upsidedownvelo]

Hi, I'm kinda new to blender, I just start learning this for 2 months but I want to make Hell RX so badly because I didn't see many RX tracks around (I only found Holjes and Blackwood)

I'm making this from scratch and having no data except from gmaps screenshot and the track is nearly good but I have some problems.

• How to make the sand leaving some dust?
  When I test it I cant see any dust, I even copy the surface.ini from Holjes and Blackwood but didn't change anything.
• What is the best way to make trees and grass environment?
  I tried using particles but that's just unnecessarily heavy, the track itself barely 4MB but the grass is 16MB lol.
• What is the best way to do the texture, especially for asphalt?
  Did I need to use a seamless texture or I need to paint it all as a whole circuit, because I want to make some roadmarks etc.
• What is the limit on putting things?
  Prop cars, trees, buildings, spectators, when those things are being too much? I don't want my track to be CPU killer

That's it for now, I hope anyone care to give me some advice.
Thanks before!

 

[Ben O'Bro]

Hey congrats on getting things done !
i'm no user of blender so can't help you in that aspect.

If it's only grass, the recent Shader Patch for Assetto does the job pretty well, putting grass "automatically" in the green areas (or setting a different thresold to cover less green too)
If that can help you cover surface with automated grass is one thing, but regular users won't see it (although there are less and less of them) so it's a good idea to also make it the old fashion way :
Usually people spread flat objects with a row of grass, in a random way, so it looks like grass blades, but not actual individual blades! That's way too heavy for AC engine.
Meanwhile trees and bushes are a X or Y-shape objects
I don't know tools for Blender probably plugins to randomize objects on a surface etc.

for the road you'll need a seamless texture indeed
and to create variety you can mix couple of texture and/or normal map etc.
try look at existing tracks is always a nice amount of advice and ideas

for dirt to create dust, you need your object to be named 1DIRT_myroad for example, in reference at the "dirt" in surfaces.ini
1ROAD_
1GRASS_
1SAND_
1KERB_
and so on, those tend to be default but you could create your own and set custom friction etc.

i listed a few links here years after years
i'm not specialized at all in tracks, so that section must be really incomplete!
but maybe something can help :

How to MOD ! (Links & ref)

Hey there. In my Caterham (& modding) journey to Assetto, i keep going back to useful posts, sometimes savings links as shortcut to be sure to keep that valuable info on how to something in particular. Today i decided it would be nice to do a sticky note where we would edit this post in useful...

www.racedepartment.com

lilski did an extended list of tips :

General - Proper technique in track making plus tips

This is mainly a direct copy from the AC forums. It may take some time to get it all here and linked properly to this forum so bear with me. Right now all the links below will take you to the AC forum. After I get all my posts in I will update them. EDIT: This thread is not a place to ask...

www.racedepartment.com

keep us posted

 

[upsidedownvelo]

Hey congrats on getting things done !
i'm no user of blender so can't help you in that aspect.

If it's only grass, the recent Shader Patch for Assetto does the job pretty well, putting grass "automatically" in the green areas (or setting a different thresold to cover less green too)
If that can help you cover surface with automated grass is one thing, but regular users won't see it (although there are less and less of them) so it's a good idea to also make it the old fashion way :
Usually people spread flat objects with a row of grass, in a random way, so it looks like grass blades, but not actual individual blades! That's way too heavy for AC engine.
Meanwhile trees and bushes are a X or Y-shape objects
I don't know tools for Blender probably plugins to randomize objects on a surface etc.

for the road you'll need a seamless texture indeed
and to create variety you can mix couple of texture and/or normal map etc.
try look at existing tracks is always a nice amount of advice and ideas

for dirt to create dust, you need your object to be named 1DIRT_myroad for example, in reference at the "dirt" in surfaces.ini
1ROAD_
1GRASS_
1SAND_
1KERB_
and so on, those tend to be default but you could create your own and set custom friction etc.

i listed a few links here years after years
i'm not specialized at all in tracks, so that section must be really incomplete!
but maybe something can help :

How to MOD ! (Links & ref)

Hey there. In my Caterham (& modding) journey to Assetto, i keep going back to useful posts, sometimes savings links as shortcut to be sure to keep that valuable info on how to something in particular. Today i decided it would be nice to do a sticky note where we would edit this post in useful...

www.racedepartment.com

lilski did an extended list of tips :

General - Proper technique in track making plus tips

This is mainly a direct copy from the AC forums. It may take some time to get it all here and linked properly to this forum so bear with me. Right now all the links below will take you to the AC forum. After I get all my posts in I will update them. EDIT: This thread is not a place to ask...

www.racedepartment.com

keep us posted

Thanks for the links, I'm gonna check those.

About the object name, should I name the gravel track DIRT or SAND? If I want to use DIRT as gravel track, is the SAND for runover section of track?

I will try the shader patch for grass at first until I figure how to do a proper grass, thanks once again.

 

[NightEye87]

The name actually doesn't matter. If you name it MUD or THISSURFACE and put that in surfaces.ini it works. For dust to kick up, I believe you need the dirt setting to be quite high (0.2 or something?).

3D grass is covered in a tutorial. I can't find it but it might be in the thread about track making. Same goes for trees and such.

For props: go crazy. AC can easily handle 10 million tris total, as long as your draw calls aren't crazy high. I can write a complete essay on that but I'm on my phone right now..

I believe asphalt is somewhat covered in some tutorial. In short: have a texture for diffuse (usually 1024×4096), map your track along it, use the right shader (I believe it needs to be unlocked or something? **fresnel_nm), use a tiled detail texture and tiled normal map.
If you use content manager, open the Object Inspector app and ALT+click on the road to see shader and texture information.

Let us know if you need specifics

 

[Stereo]

The name actually doesn't matter. If you name it MUD or THISSURFACE and put that in surfaces.ini it works. For dust to kick up, I believe you need the dirt setting to be quite high (0.2 or something?).

Friction under 0.8 as far as I know is the only cue it goes off of.

 

[upsidedownvelo]

The name actually doesn't matter. If you name it MUD or THISSURFACE and put that in surfaces.ini it works. For dust to kick up, I believe you need the dirt setting to be quite high (0.2 or something?).

3D grass is covered in a tutorial. I can't find it but it might be in the thread about track making. Same goes for trees and such.

For props: go crazy. AC can easily handle 10 million tris total, as long as your draw calls aren't crazy high. I can write a complete essay on that but I'm on my phone right now..

I believe asphalt is somewhat covered in some tutorial. In short: have a texture for diffuse (usually 1024×4096), map your track along it, use the right shader (I believe it needs to be unlocked or something? **fresnel_nm), use a tiled detail texture and tiled normal map.
If you use content manager, open the Object Inspector app and ALT+click on the road to see shader and texture information.

Let us know if you need specifics

Ah I see okay then, I'll try to more into surfaces.ini later on.
I founded the tree tutorial from one of Ben O'Bro's link but didn't found the grass one, probably gonna do a little improvisation until I found the right way to do it.

For props: go crazy. AC can easily handle 10 million tris total, as long as your draw calls aren't crazy high. I can write a complete essay on that but I'm on my phone right now..

Sorry but I didn't really understand what "draw calls" is. But what I know, ksEditor having a limit like 6x.xxx verticles per mesh, so I'm guessing I need to separate them to some mesh right?
I mentioned it earlier, when I tried to make the grass manually and using the hair particles in blender. It's going okay when i exported it to FBX, but when I import the FBX to ksEditor, it tooks forever until the app crashes. So I pressume that my grass is just too much.

I believe asphalt is somewhat covered in some tutorial. In short: have a texture for diffuse (usually 1024×4096), map your track along it, use the right shader (I believe it needs to be unlocked or something? **fresnel_nm), use a tiled detail texture and tiled normal map.
If you use content manager, open the Object Inspector app and ALT+click on the road to see shader and texture information.

Let us know if you need specifics

I didn't really catch this, is there any example file for me to work on first?
Thanks!

 

[upsidedownvelo]

Friction under 0.8 as far as I know is the only cue it goes off of.

What is the best start value for gravel's friction and damping?

 

[NightEye87]

3D grass tutorial: https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/3d-grass-how-to.25087/
Note: it's for 3DSMax, but the same can easily be done in Blender. Any tutorial online on using the scatter function will help you with that.
As Ben said, GrassFX is way easier, nicer looking and quicker, but vanilla users will not be able to see it.

Asphalt:
UV map your mesh onto a 1:4 texture. It can be other dimensions but a longer texture means better AF behaviour.

Then for material settings and such, this may help: https://www.racedepartment.com/thre...n-track-making-plus-tips.122794/#post-2256511

This is some info on draw calls: https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/...ack-making-plus-tips.27180/page-9#post-814957
Via the 'Render stats' app ingame you can see what your DIP is. On Kunos tracks that's usually around 1000-1500.

The 65k vertex limit is something you don't reach easily. Apart from when you're doing full 3D guardrails or your physical road mesh. If you do reach it on your land mesh for example, make sure all vertices are connected (merge in edit mode via Alt+M, by distance) and your mesh is smoothened (right click in object mode > shade smooth, sometimes needs normals resetting in edit mode via Alt+N, reset vectors. I'm sure that's powerful in Blender, just not very user friendly and intuitive).
I mean, sure, you could reach it on your land mesh if you use LIDAR data for your mesh, but ideally any LIDAR data should be used to retopo over it.

 

[ronkeldonk]

Hi, I'm kinda new to blender, I just start learning this for 2 months but I want to make Hell RX so badly because I didn't see many RX tracks around (I only found Holjes and Blackwood)

I'm making this from scratch and having no data except from gmaps screenshot and the track is nearly good but I have some problems.

View attachment 419246

• How to make the sand leaving some dust?
  When I test it I cant see any dust, I even copy the surface.ini from Holjes and Blackwood but didn't change anything.
• What is the best way to make trees and grass environment?
  I tried using particles but that's just unnecessarily heavy, the track itself barely 4MB but the grass is 16MB lol.
• What is the best way to do the texture, especially for asphalt?
  Did I need to use a seamless texture or I need to paint it all as a whole circuit, because I want to make some roadmarks etc.
• What is the limit on putting things?
  Prop cars, trees, buildings, spectators, when those things are being too much? I don't want my track to be CPU killer

View attachment 419247

That's it for now, I hope anyone care to give me some advice.
Thanks before!

did you get it done? i live right next to this track and have driven it multiple times irl, would be cool to have it in ac